Excerpt from Chapter One of From Elder to Ancestor – Nature Kinship for All Seasons of Life

Our Cultural Relationship to Animistic Elderhood

When we were animists, when our identities were land-based, when our rituals were in direct relationship with the Nature Spirits of our ancestral lands, we had consistent rituals to tend our dead. Without those land and ancestral connections and with church-imposed disruption of our death rituals, we have a backlog of unquiet dead because we haven’t given proper death rites for thousands of years.  Colonization divided and conquered us from each other, so that we would forget the power of oneness.

In From Elder to Ancestor I state:

Pain becomes trauma when it is not held in Oneness. The same could be said of entire peoples, of the cultural disruption of our Ancestors. When they lost a sense of personal and cultural wholeness along with their kinship with Nature, then pain became trauma. The transition and its aftermath would have compounded into a direct impact on sacred rituals, Nature relationships, and surviving elders. It would have created division, such that people would have been pitted against each other for resources and power in a way they never had been before. It would have created isolation that became trauma.

One way we can reconnect to our animistic natures, our ancestors, and the wholeness available to us now is by tending our dead appropriately. When we do, we heal ancestral wounds and rebalance sociopolitical power dynamics that have none of our welfare in mind. We tend our dead through deathwalking.

Join me 3 November for In the Danger of Death, an experiential course and ritual session that I facilitate every Autumn to reconcile our unquiet dead. In this session learn psychopomp work, or deathwalking, in season with the natural elements of Autumn that facilitate us helping our unquiet dead to move on.

In this gathering you will learn:

• The difference between animism and soul tending
• What deathwalking is
• What The Broken Path is
• Why we don’t deathwalk
• Why we must deathwalk our dead
• Why the dead are unquiet
• A group ritual of deathwalking

Gain animistic insight into the runes, learn to elder well with ancient wisdom, and cultivate a strong spiritual path

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S. Kelley Harrell, M. Div.

Kelley Harrell is an animist, author, deathwalker, and death doula held by Tuscarora, Woccon, and Sissipihaw land. For the last 30 years, through Soul Intent Arts she’s helped others ethically build thriving spiritual paths. Her work is Nature-based, and centers soul tending through the Elder Futhark runes, animism, ancestral tending, and deathwork. She hosts the podcast, What in the Wyrd, and also writes The Weekly Rune as a celebration of the Elder Futhark in season. Work with her in the Runes for Change community or in her intensive soul tending training, The Spirited Path.  Full bio.

#beyourcommunity ~ #youareecosystem

elder well, die well, ancestor well

@kelleysoularts